Beautiful Butterfiles

Plan and Superplan in a Butterfly's Egg

Hunting for butterfly eggs is a difficult business. Not only because they are
vanishingly small—scarcely a millimetre long and only a fraction as
wide—but because the female of the species attaches them almost exclusively
to the underside of leaves, where they are much harder to see.

She acts as
if she knew exactly that eggs laid on top of the leaf would wash off in the
next rain shower, be desiccated by the hot rays of the sun or, perhaps even
before this, be discovered by the keen eyes of hungry birds.1

It seems fairly safe to assume that no butterfly ‘knows’ what
it is doing. It seems unlikely that a butterfly thinks through the possible
consequences of its action. When carrying out this act of egg-laying, so vital
for the survival of their kind, all the females of each species behave in
the same way, without first having to learn this proper egg-laying procedure,
with its seeming wisdom. Butterflies brought up totally alone and isolated
from all of their fellows, with no opportunity to copy this behaviour from
others, do not differ in the slightest in the way they carry out this task.

This means, of course, that the behavioural instinct must be
present from birth. The information necessary for such behaviour must already
be there in the egg, stored in coded form ready for future decoding and use.
After all, the information-bearing substance of heredity, the species-specific
DNA, does not change in the slightest during the transformation (meta-morphosis)
of this egg to the caterpillar stage, then through the pupa right up to the
imago, the finished butterfly. Not one scrap of new information (through learning,
for example) is added to the DNA during this entire life-cycle.

Stores information for three stages

The remarkable thing about this tiny butterfly egg is that it
contains the information for all three stages stored in its microscopically
small nucleus. It must contain the instructions for building and operating
a caterpillar; for the pupa which develops from this and for the development
and operation of the butterfly. All three of these stages arc remarkably different
in form, function and behaviour.

The remarkable thing about this tiny butterfly egg is that it contains the information for all three stages stored in its microscopically small nucleus.

Every one of these radically different programs must be called
into play and executed at exactly the right time, cleanly separated from the
others.

The caterpillar develops cutting jaws, well-suited to chewing
on leaves. This is the same diet for which its intestine, with its specific
digestive glands, is so well suited that it often eats exclusively the leaves
of a single plant species. The butterfly, on the other hand, has jaws no longer
suited for chewing. Instead, it has a long sucker (proboscis) which enables
it to drink flower nectar for nourishment. This butterfly lays its eggs exclusively
on the leaves of the same type of plant on which it was nourished as a caterpillar,
following its inherited, instinctive program.

Right amount for caterpillar

Underneath their innocuous exterior, these eggs contain just
the right amount of protein-building substances. Not even the tiniest micro-drop
too little or too much to manufacture a complete, albeit still very tiny, caterpillar
body; the jaws, eyes like scarcely visible points, smell and taste organs tuned
in to a particular plant species, an intestine with all necessary digestive
glands, three pairs of segmented breast-plates and those eightunique stumpy
feet. The soft soles of these feet are able to adhere as firmly to the most
mirror-smooth surfaces as their circular bristles cling to rough surfaces.

This caterpillar gets its oxygen from delicately stiffened breathing
tubes (tracheas) which open on to its flanks, protected from the finest of
dust particles by miniature sieves. Also larger caterpillars often show quite
a complicated pat-tern of coloration. Specific pigments of varying amounts
and densities deposited in the right places according to a strictly

species-specific plan can give multi-coloured surfaces, stripes
and spots. This results in extremely effective camouflaging to protect the
caterpillar from predators such as birds.

The growth of this butterfly’s larva requires a further
program that also has to be carried out precisely. Because the leathery skin
of a caterpillar does not grow along with it, it must shed the skin from time
to time. However, this will only work if, at just the right time (according
to a plan of course), a new skin has developed under the old one. This new
skin still has to be somewhat folded up and thus more flexible before it replaces
the old.

Suspended animation?

When the caterpillar is fully grown, it sheds its skin for the
last time. But what now appears—the pupa—has almost no resemblance
to a caterpillar. This motionless pupa has neither head nor legs. Before its
transformation, the caterpillar (directed again by programmed information)
spins a silken ‘safety-belt’ with which it anchors itself against
a twig.

Its apparent motionlessness is purely an external feature. Under
this seemingly lifeless shell, something quite unbelievable is happening. The
old caterpillar organs, with the exception of the nervous system, begin to
totally dissolve into smaller groups of cells, even to disintegrate into single
cells. From this ‘cellular soup’, new and (in part) quite different
organs begin to develop.

It is precisely when you consider this puzzling rebuilding process—metamorphosis as it is called—that you are struck with the certainty that everything
is happening here with the utmost precision according to an extremely cleverly
programmed plan. Without central direction towards a pre-programmed goal, a
random agitation of these countless millions of cells could never give rise
to anything other than a disordered, chaotic, tumour-like heap of cells, which
would not be capable of survival.

Remarkable plan

What happens instead is that new functional organs are constructed,
which then collaborate and complement each other in a purposive and error-free
way to form a new and radically different organism—the butterfly.

Consider this glorious butterfly, with perhaps spectacularly
colourful wings, which it immediately knows how to use in the right way without
time-consuming trial and error, this butterfly which now has large, faceted
compound eyes and a sucker rolled up ready to be extended and retracted as
needed.

The young butterfly is instantly able to properly utilize all these various organs, because of its inherited programs for instinctive behaviour.

Now compare it to its beginnings as a caterpillar. Ponder, for
example, the butterfly’s finely jointed long legs capable of landing
safely and clinging to blossoms which blow back and forth in the breeze. Blossoms
which it is able to locate from remarkable distances with the help of its long
feelers acting as highly sensitive organs of smell. The young butterfly is
instantly able to properly utilize all these various organs, because of its
inherited programs for instinctive behaviour.

To get some further idea of the degree of organization involved
in this transformation of a creeping, worm-like caterpillar into the flying
butterfly, let us simply look at just one small part of the butterfly, the
patterns of colour in its wings. We are dealing here with mosaic pictures,
made up of countless thousands of individual, vividly coloured dermal scales.
On a single square millimetre of wing surface, there can be as many as 600
of these, arranged in straight lines as if drawn with a ruler and systematically
overlapping each other like roofing tiles.

The right spot

It is inconceivable how these scales, depending upon the requirements
of the place at which they are formed, always contain the exact colouring substance
necessary for this spot. If the scale is part of the yellow stripe forming
a portion of such a characteristic pattern, it must be a yellow one. Some butterflies
have patterns resembling eyes: if it is in the ‘pupil’ of one
of these eyes, the scale must develop as a black or dark brown one. The Apollo
butterfly has a red ring bordering its characteristic eye pattern, and only
those scales located within this particular region contain the red pigment.2

These mosaical patterns on butterfly wings are for all practical
purposes transmitted unchanged from generation to generation as part of this
remarkable program. This means that the position and the final colour (whether
through pigment or structure) of each of these countless individual wing scales
must already be encoded as exact information in this very same egg cell nucleus—alongside
all of the other incredibly complex and intricate information for the construction
and the functioning of all the other organs of this creature.

This degree of miniaturization of information storage can hardly
be imagined. To appreciate the technical difficulties that have been mastered
here, consider the fact that the exactly symmetrical patterns on a butterfly’s
wings developed while the wings were totally crumpled up in the cramped conditions
of the pupal case. Nevertheless, when the wings unfold for the first time,
one will always see the distinctive pattern unique to that species.

Twin plan

The butterfly Araschnia levana has an even more incredibly complicated
feature. If you compare the butterfly which slips out of the pupa in spring
with one of the same species which lived out its pupal stage during summer,
you would think that you were faced with two completely different, not even
closely related, types of butterflies. They are conspicuously different in
their basic colouration and their wing mosaic.

In this case an environmental factor, namely the daily light
duration, triggers off the development of one or the other of the two patterns
which already exist as coded information in the DNA of the nucleus of the egg.
It is already astonishing to have two such programs stored in this tiny living
microchip. But in addition to this, there must be a further program, a super-program
as it were, which is sovereign over the various developmental pathways of this
cellular tissue and gives it instructions, to bring one or the other of these
pre-existing programs to realization. This super-program therefore recognizes
signals from outside, in this case the length of the day, and gives instructions
to ‘switch on’ the appropriate seasonal form. The ability to recognize
these secondary environmental factors is also, therefore, firmly implanted
in this egg cell nucleus.

Mind-boggling

One thing seems abundantly clear when one considers this mind-boggling
and complex hierarchy of super-programs and subordinate programs. To hold,
in Monod’s phrase, pure ‘chance and necessity’ (the ‘blind
watchmaker’, according to Dawkins) solely responsible for the origin
of such information storage and retrieval systems would seem to justify, even
after more than a century, Nietzsche’s incisive comment—namely,
that such conclusions would seem to merit a diagnosis of psychological imbalance.3

Granted, at the time Darwin’s Origin of Species impacted
on the world, nobody knew anything about computers, their construction, or
their programming. Nor about the sorts of insights this would provide into
the long neglected achievements of ‘living computers’. In today’s
computer age, however, we know that information of this order never arises
from unprogrammed matter by itself. While it may be transmitted from one ‘machine’ (having
equal or greater information) to another, the ultimate origin of all such information
is only to be found in mind, in an intelligence outside of the system itself.

References and footnotes

According to verbal communication from the Australian Butterfly
Sanctuary (Kuranda, Far North Queensland) one does see occasional exceptions
to this general rule. The tropical Australian Ulysses butterfly, for instance, is such a ‘tense, jittery’ creature that
it sometimes lays its eggs in what appears to be an unseemly hurry. In such
instances the eggs may end up on the ‘wrong’ side of the leaf.
However, more often than not it will properly fulfil its instinctually programmed
preference for the underside.

Scales in white regions usually have no pigment. They obtain
their whiteness because of their particular structure, through the total reflection
of sunlight, the same reason why snow looks white. Even blue is not a colour
as such in the butterfly wing (just as the sky has no blue pigment), but comes
about due to the very complicated fine structure of special scales causing
scattering and interference of light.